These are not the opening lines of a novel. These aren?t characters that I made up. This is not something that happened inside my head. This happened to me. My dad left me. There. Here?s what happened there:
Bonners Ferry, Idaho is way the fuck out in the middle of nowhere. Panhandle. Go even further north ten miles until you are really close to the Canadian border. That is the location. If you remember Ruby Ridge, you are in the right neighborhood. Incidentally, just a few months prior to my arrival, one of Richard Armstrong?s collegues at RMA quietly left ?teaching? at the ?school? after being privately exposed as a white supremecist. With a plan in motion to kidnap kids ?especially Jewish ones? to ransom for monies destined for Hayden Lake, Idaho where the Aryan Nation had its headquarters. I would like to think that had my parents been provided with this information, perhaps I would have been spared the next two and a half years. Maybe they would?ve had a quick preview of the potential dangers that I could engage with and decide against this treachery. But I don?t think anyone in my family was keeping up to current events in an area almost as sparsely populated as Atlantis. I will probably say ?As I look back on it? so many times that every time I mean that or ?in hindsight? or ?retrospect? that I will just say AILBOI. So: AILBOI, I remember being woken up damn early in the morning by my father. We had rented a car in some god forsaken place named Spokane. I came along for the airplane ride. We were going skiing. In July. So in order to reciprocate the good intentions of my father, I agreed to look at some boarding school that was near the slopes. It was pretty cold, I remember. Though I remember also almost never being awake before eleven or later before this. Maybe there would be some snow up higher in the mountains. Well, it was so damn early and we had gotten in from the airport pretty late that I slept. And I was still pretty much asleep as we made our way from the hotel that morning. Kootenai Inn. I ?ll never forget it.
